wish: better access control

Posted Sep 17, 2005 23:03 UTC (Sat) by kevinbsmith (guest, #4778)
In reply to: wish: better access control by dann
Parent article: Mercurial: an alternative to git

Distributed VCS automatically gives developers the ability to work effectively without accounts on a central server. That means that contributors can work on whatever they want, with no risk of damaging the official tree.

In several distributed VCS systems, a branch is a directory. In that case, it's pretty easy to control access, including marking the whole branch as readonly.

Distributed VCS is really a whole new paradigm, and it takes a while for most people to even start to understand how to use this new tool effectively. It's not appropriate for all projects, but personally I think it is a big improvement for most FLOSS projects (where potential contributors may not be trusted yet), and for many/most projects of any kind where the developers are geographically distributed.

wish: better access control

Posted Sep 18, 2005 6:23 UTC (Sun) by dann (guest, #11621) [Link] (4 responses)

The fact is that when multiple people work on the same project their work
must be somehow merged together in a single place. If more than one person
has write access to that place, then it would be nice to have a way to control access.

wish: better access control

Posted Sep 18, 2005 14:26 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (2 responses)

I think the way to go in that case would be to have a "team leader" that picks the relevant changes from everyone and applies them to her own tree. So no need to have access control there. But maybe you are thinking of a different scenario.

wish: better access control

Posted Sep 18, 2005 15:40 UTC (Sun) by dann (guest, #11621) [Link] (1 responses)

Having a single leader that applies all the changes is simply NOT the way
a lot of (probably most) software is developed. Allowing more that one person to make changes is very important.

wish: better access control

Posted Sep 18, 2005 16:40 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

It is not how software is developed nowadays, but simply because we use the old paradigm of "single repository -- multiple branches". If we switched to a new distributed paradigm, where a developer publishes her changes and a leader imports them in order to make a version, these new tools would become indispensable. But don't you think that applying the old way of thinking to the new source management model would just add needless complexity?

wish: better access control

Posted Sep 22, 2005 18:39 UTC (Thu) by bos (guest, #6154) [Link]

Merging work and write access are orthogonal concepts.

Here's how merging works in a distributed SCM.

You publish your changes somewhere, and tell me. I pull them over, and merge my changes in. I publish the merged result, and tell you. You pull the results of the merge.

Now we both have your changes and mine, but at no point did either of us have write access to the other's storage.

Another way of approaching the issue: we both have write access to a shared server. However, in many systems, we can't push changes to the server without merging first, so the server cannot get into a messy unmerged state.